I. A dynamically evolving stimulus is often perceived as a series of transformations of another stimulus. For example, an observer may describe the changing appearance of a face in terms of a series of facial expressions: "T closed her left eye halfway, and then she opened it again; after that, she closed her right eye halfway and then closed her left eye halfway again". Classical Western music is based on an explicit set of such transformations. For instance, a listener may describe the evolution of two simultaneously played tones in terms of pitch transformations: "The pitch of the lower note increased by a `third` and then decreased to its original value; then the pitch of the higher note increased by a `third`, followed by a similar increase in pitch of the lower note". Static stimuli may be similarly described in terms of imagined transformations of imagined stimuli; e.g. "T had both eyes closed halfway", or "Today, the color is more intense and redder than it was yesterday." All of these descriptions depend on the observer's choice of: 1) a "reference" stimulus (e.g. T's face with both eyes open in the first example; "yesterday's color" in the last example); 2) "reference" transformations which are applied to the reference stimulus (e.g. the half closure of each eye in the first example; changes in the intensity and redness of the color in the last example).
The choice of a reference stimulus is a matter of convenience. For example, the observer could have chosen the reference face with both eyes closed and noted that "T had both eyes halfway open"; in the same way, the proverbial glass of water can be described as half full or half empty. The choice of reference transformations is also a matter of convenience. For example, the first observer could have used transformations which are linear combinations of single eye movements; e.g. eye movements could have been described as changes in: a) the average state of closure of the two eyes and b) the difference between the closure states of the two eyes. In any event, once the reference stimulus and transformations have been chosen, the evolving stimulus can be described in terms of the serial application of these "standard" transformations.
In the above descriptions it is implicit that the observer perceives certain transformations of the evolving stimulus to be equivalent to the reference transformations of the reference stimulus. In the first example, the observer implicitly equated a transformation of the already transformed face (the final partial closure of the left eye) to an earlier transformation of the reference face (the initial partial closure of the left eye). Likewise, in the musical example, the listener equated a transformation of the already transformed pair of notes (the final pitch change of the lower note) to an earlier transformation of the reference pair of notes (the initial pitch change of the lower note). In discrete form, these equivalence relations express the observer's perception that pairs of stimuli are analogous; e.g. facial expression 4 is to facial expression 3 as facial expression 2 is to facial expression 1. The perceived equivalence of transformations establishes the framework which the observer uses to organize his/her perceptions. If the observer did not perceive such equivalencies, new conventions would have to be established to describe the observed transformations of each state of the evolving stimulus. This can be made more explicit by consideration of the following example. Suppose that the stimulus consists of the movements of a dot on a map of Chicago. The observer might report that "the dot was initially located at the John Hancock Building; then, it moved two miles west, then one mile north, and finally two miles east". In this case, the observer chose to describe the evolving stimulus in terms of an initial reference state, consisting of the dot at the John Hancock Building, and in terms of reference transformations consisting of one mile movements in the north/south and east/west directions. The observer implicitly equated directions and lengths of movements at later stages of the journey to those at earlier stages; e.g. both the first and third legs of the journey were identified as two mile movements in the east/west direction. Such equivalent movements would be easy to identify if the map were covered by a Cartesian grid of east/west and north/south lines having spacing considerably less that one mile.
On the other hand, suppose that there were no grid lines and the observer had to rely on the traditional scale bar together with an image of the "four points of the compass", located in one corner of the map. Then, the observer would have to imagine how to translate these across the map in order to define equivalent directions and lengths at each point along the trajectory of the dot. These "local" compasses and scale bars could then be used to describe each leg of the dot's trajectory. If two observers perceived different equivalence relations of this type, their perceptions of the moving dot would differ. For example, if the two observers had different senses of parallelism, they might have different perceptions of local direction at some points on the map; e.g. observer Ob might give the above-mentioned description while observer Ob' might perceive the final dot movement to be "two miles in a direction slightly south of east". Similarly, in the above-mentioned musical example, two listeners might differ in their identification of the pitch change of the lower note after the pitch change of the higher note. For instance, the first listener might give the above-mentioned description while the second listener might perceive that the lower note's pitch was finally raised by less than a third. This would indicate that the pitch change of the higher note had a different influence on each observer's perception of subsequent changes in the pitch of the lower note.
The present inventive method shows how to use the methods of differential geometry to describe an observer's perception of equivalency between transformations of different stimuli. Specifically, the stimuli are taken to define the points of a continuous manifold. Then, transformations of stimuli correspond to line segments on the manifold. Therefore, an observer's perception of equivalence between transformations of different stimuli defines the equivalence between line segments at different points on the manifold. Mathematically, a method of "parallel transporting" line segments across a manifold without changing their perceived direction or length serves to define an affine connection on the manifold. Thus, an affine connection can be used to describe the experience of almost any observer who perceives such equivalence relations. It should be emphasized that the present inventive method and apparatus does not seek to model the perceptual mechanisms of the observer; the proposed formalism merely provides a way of describing the perceptions of the observer, who is treated as a "black box". Therefore, the technique is applicable to a large variety of perceptual systems (humans or machines) and to a wide range of stimulus types (visual, auditory, etc.). It provides a systematic framework for measuring and characterizing perceptual experiences. For example, aspects of the intrinsic consistency of an observer's perceptions can be characterized by the curvature and other tensors that can be constructed from the measured affine connection. Furthermore, the perceptual performances of two observers can be compared systematically by comparing their affine connections.